What's to write home about?

Thursday, May 1, 2008

THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF MEDIA FUSS this week about being patriotic and “proud to be American”.

Pastor Jeremiah Wright prompted much of it during that burst of TV appearances he made, when among his various, er, jeremiads he rather neatly, if preeningly, emphasized his own service in the Marines – to contrast with Vice President Dick Cheney’s lack of a military record (Cheney had “other priorities”, you’ll recall).

 

More significantly, maybe, Wright’s evident America-trashing (from the wacky and wayward “government spreads AIDS among blacks” to the simply contentious and familiar “state terror overseas breeds fanatics’ terrorism”) also gave his former congregant Barack Obama the opportunity for a determined piece of political theatre - with Democrat “super-delegates” as the front-row audience – and with himself in the role as protector of America’s good name.

 

I’m back in the non-VIP seats, and I’m still only a fledgling US citizen after just five years, but national pride has been pre-occupying me too.

 

A case in point. It took about four years and a lot of legal pressure, but George W Bush’s Administration has released under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act one significant bundle - about 100,000 pages - of important government documents. FOIA is a considerable piece of legislation - splendidly American, and a model for such democratic instruments throughout the world. But this particular batch of government information gives details of America’s treatment of its “Global War on Terror” detainees.

 

I’ve been sinking myself a bit (just as much as I can bear, frankly) into those details since Jameel Jaffer, director of the National Security Project set up by the American Civil Liberties Union, came on radio to discuss them – in the latest edition of the syndicated show Voices of Our World, for which I was the host. (You can hear that edition, titled “Tortured Logic” by clicking here.)

 

In his interview with the show’s producer Michael Jones, Jaffer mentioned one instance - among many - of a detainee who died in US custody. The dead man was a 47-year old Iraqi killed after being severely beaten in January 2004 at Iraq’s Camp Al Asad – and the circumstances described by Jaffer sent me straight to the Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s autopsy report (reproduced above left).

 

The man’s name is redacted, but the report recounts baldly that he:

 

 “... was shackled to the top of a doorframe with a gag in his mouth at the time he lost consciousness and became pulseless. The severe blunt force injuries, the hanging position, and the obstruction of the oral cavity with a gag contributed to this individual’s death. The manner of death is homicide.”

 

Jeffer was in the forefront of advocates pressing for these papers to be made public, and I was struck by his mild-mannered, muted (maybe just lawyerly) reaction to the written record here. “You don’t expect to find that kind of document in the custody of the United States Government. It’s quite shocking, I think”.

 

It will perhaps come as no surprise that there is no record of any prosecution following this homicide.

 

Jaffer and a co-author, ACLU staff attorney Amrit Singh, present the documents of such outrages quietly but forcefully in Administration of Torture, published by Columbia University Press. The former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, says the book, in presenting “the grim reality of the torture and abuse of prisoners held in US custody” serves powerfully to highlight “the devastating effects of deviating from long-standing legal prohibitions on the mistreatment of prisoners”.

 

It makes me revisit, in an emphatically questioning tone of voice, that very idiomatic American exclamation: “Is this a great country ... Or what?”

 

 

**DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY FRIDAY ON  WHDD - ROBIN HOOD RADIO**
Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE

 

 

 

FROM A TINY COUNTRY – WALES – HAS COME MANY A HUGE VOICE and one of the biggest boomers is bass-baritone Bryn Terfel (above center).

 

I was lucky enough, along with a gang of appreciative Welsh exiles as it happened, to catch his recital with pianist Malcolm Martineau at Carnegie Hall last week.  It was a timely reminder that great art, however rooted it might have to be in some specific geographical seedbed, will always transcend nationality.

 

Terfel was as compelling with Mozart’s song of loving farewell “Io ti lascio, o cara, addio” (written just months before the composer’s death in 1791) as he was jolly - and yet haunting and subtle, too - with the complete contrast of "Molly Malone", the immemorial folk-anthem of Dublin's fair city.

 

For that Irish number, Terfel actually got the Carnegie patrons (many of them the kind of crowd that John Lennon once exhorted to “rattle yer jewelry”) standing up en masse to sway in, yes, a sing-along.  He’d already had me swaying from the opening of his Pan-Celtic selection  -  his mistily lilting “Loch Lomond” stirred in me all the nostalgic pride of a transplanted Scot.

 

You just have to be careful what exactly you’re proud of in a nation.

 

 

 

TODAY - AS ON MANY A DAY RECENTLY – CHINESE PRIDE is to take a knock. Chinese living in the US, especially students - who incidentally have doubled in their number over the past five years - are angry at the way their country is being denounced in Western media during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, and some of their own protests (against Free Tibet speakers, for instance) are reported as having been encouraged, perhaps even coerced, by the authorities back home.

 

Undaunted,  members of the international writers’ organization PEN - led by prominent scribes Edward Albee, Rick Moody (above right), Francine Prose and Salman Rushdie - will this morning take a petition comprising at least 2,500 signatures to the Chinese Mission in New York, demanding the release of an estimated 39 writers - surely an underestimate - who are being held in prison.

 

Moody (of most famously The Ice Storm and more recently Right Livelihoods, which comprises three novellas) pointed out to me that previous PEN actions have won significant results for imprisoned, detained and persecuted writers “and this has been true in country after country, no matter how intractable the despotism involved.”

 

Moody had been mock-seriously accusing me of asking a “BBC-style question” because I'd wondered, maybe somewhat bluntly, what realistic impact he could expect, considering that almost no Chinese and very few Chinese leaders will even know who he and his writer-cohorts are.

 

His considered rebuttal: “I assume China is not immune to pressure, and they have proved as much in the past. They are, as we speak, restarting direct talks with the Dalai Lama's people. If PEN cannot directly effect movement here, it can, at the very least, be part of a broad spectrum of public opinion in the West, which can and does help. I'm honored to be part of that ambition”.